The Pro/USER Technical Committees continue to expand their focus across both national borders and PTC® product lines. With the launch of our first European annual confer-ence in May, the European Technical Committees will be meeting as part of this event. And with the recent decision to represent the Windchill Developers Group as well as other PTC product users, Pro/USER is in the process of assembling several new Windchill-related committees.

Europe Here We Come
As many of you are now aware, Berlin, Germany will be the site of the first European Pro/USER Conference. For more information, please see page 16 or visit www.prouser.org. Just as we do at the annual US conference, we will be holding Technical Committee meetings prior to the official start of the European conference on May 20, 2001. In preparation for this exciting new initiative, we held a kickoff meeting for the Technical Committees in Berlin on February 9, 2001. I am personally looking forward to working closely with the European Technical Committees to help forge strong relationships with other Technical Committees focused on the same product areas.

Windchill TCs Now Forming
To be considered “active,” a Pro/USER Technical Committee must meet at least twice a year—including one meeting at the US annual conference. Committees establish a product or module “vision,” then work with PTC product line managers and developers to come up with a development road map. White papers play a key role in the process of defining this plan. Technical Committees also monitor enhancement requests for their particular product or module, and provide PTC an annual Top 10 list of users’ highest priorities.

In addition to the 17 Technical Committees rep-resenting PTC’s MCAD products, Pro/USER already has two Windchill TCs up and running:

• WorkGroup Manager Chair: Erv Rawlings, Lockheed Martin Astronautics (erv@ast.lmco.com)
• Visualization Chair: Jim Smith, Nortel Networks (jsmith@nortelnetworks.com)

Formation of additional committees focusing on the following Windchill products is now under way:

• Enterprise PDM
• Federation
• Manufacturing Applications
• Production Planning
• RT Architecture
• Sourcing

If you are interested in heading up one of these groups, please contact me at steve@prouser.org. For general information on the Pro/USER Technical Committees, please visit our web page at www.prouser.org/tc. For specific information on the Windchill Developer Group initiative, check out their website at
www.mywindchill.org.